st lessons on the piano, and sets the engineers below to a plaintive
verge of tears. The junior officer at the voice-pipe looks reflective,
after each order he passes, as though comparing the quality of the reply
with the last sulphurous rejoinder. The fog has added to our starting
vagaries and postponed a happy understanding, but we shall do better
later on when we have gauged and discovered--and pitied--the tiresome
vacillations of the _other_ ships!

Meantime, as best we can, we chase the sheering hydroplane ahead that
seems endowed with every chameleon gift of the classic gods. It
vanishes, invisible, in a drift of fog, and though we con a course as
steady as a cat on eggs, a clearing comes to show us its white feather
broad on the bows and edging off at an angle to dip under the thick of
the mist! It drops down to us; we sheer aside and slow a pace, and it
lingers and dallies sportively abeam. It slips suddenly ahead, with a
rush and a rip, as though, like a child among the daisies, it recalls a
parent in advance.

The trumpeter astern has come up and sighted our wake and fog-buoy, and
the clamour of her questing syren is stilled. She looms up close on our
quarter, a huge menacing bulk of sheering steel with the foam thundering
under her bows and curling and shattering on her grey hull. _They_ have
great difficulty in adjusting to our speed. She slows and fades back
into the mist, grows again from gloomy shadow to threatening detail,
steadies at a point for a few minutes, and resumes the round of her
previous motions in irritating cycle. "Whatever can be the matter with
them?" (We take the stout point of a position as steady as the Rock, and
grow scornful of their clumsy efforts to keep station.) "_Huh!_ These
gold-laced London men! Why can't they steady up a bit? Why can't
they----" We note that our steering-mark and the wash of _War
Ordnance's_ propeller are no longer in sight ahead, and set in to count
the beats of the screw. ". . . t'-one, t'-two, t'-three, t'-- _Hell!_
Didn't we order seventy? Go full speed!" Jumping to the tube, the junior
attends. "_I_ said seven-owe, sir, but he thought I said six-four! Says
th' bl--, th' engines working, sir--can't hear properly!"

Grudgingly, as though loath to give us our sight again, the fog clears.
The first of the tantalizing rift in the curtain is signalled by the
high look-out, who calls that he can see the topmasts of our near
neighbours piercing the low-lying va